Dressing Modern Frenchwomen: Marketing Haute Couture, 1919-1939.

Hill, John S.

Dressing Modern Frenchwomen: Marketing Haute Couture, 1919-1939, by Mary Lynn Stewart. Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xvii, 305 pp. $55.00 US (cloth).

Mary Lynn Stewart has undertaken an enterprising study of interwar French fashion as an industry and as a discourse. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, democratization challenged both class and gender at the defining identities of full citizenship. Dress served as a well-established marker for both identities. Mass production of couture-inspired designs blurred visible class distinctions, while the designs themselves blurred visible gender distinctions. Stewart examines the interwar period to reveal how dress reflected the extent and limits of change during one key period in this process.

The dominant theme in Stewart's book is fashion as a business. Cloth and clothing figured as important French industries, and reconstruction after the First World War necessarily involved the revival of the dress trade. The couture industry often portrayed its efforts as a service to the nation, as it struggled to re-establish France's reputation as a producer of high-quality luxury goods on world export markets. By the mid-twenties, well over a million people were employed in some aspect of the textile and clothing industries, while perhaps a quarter of the working population of Paris had some connection to the women's clothing industry.

Success came at a cost. Couture proved a ferociously competitive business. Prosperity in the 1920s brought many new couture houses into existence. (The number of houses rose from twenty-five at the beginning of the decade to a hundred by the end.) Trendsetting customers were nowhere near as tractable as legend would have it. Each season the wide range of initial offerings had to be ruthlessly edited in response to the reaction of fashionable women.

Employers struggling to survive in an increasingly difficult environment fended off the demands of their workers for better wages or more job security. Couturiers and couturieres alike sought publicity and tried to establish their designs as prestigious brands in order to capture market share. This made them alert to all new forms of publicity, such as the cinema. Fashion producers clawed for recognition as artists, rather than mere craftsmen, through their patronage of modern art and by trumpeting the influence of art on their own designs. This was not mere vanity or social climbing. Recognition as an artist gave producers a better legal defense against what amounted to fashion plagiarism.

Although rickety financing kept these places afloat during boom times, the onset of the Depression brought a crisis. To make matters worse, bourgeois women wanted couture designs, but could not pay couture prices. Department store catalogues and dress patterns put couture designs--or some personalized version of them--within the reach of any woman who could sew, as most could in that now-lost world. Moreover, the department stores also sold dress materials, decorations, and sewing machines. Various proposals for a corporatist restructuring of the industry came to naught. Instead, the competitiveness of the individual producers led them to other solutions.

Many clung to the tradition of high-quality production for a limited market. To this end they continued a long-running campaign against the mass piracy of designs. Some French designers saw a way forward through pursuit of a wider, less elite market for couture. Ultimately, designers like Elsa Schiaparelli and Jean Patou solved their problems by copying themselves through ready-to-wear lines. The end result appeared in a partial "democratization" of fashion.

A second theme in Stewart's work is fashion as discourse. Interwar Frenchmen had a lot to worry about (more than a million war dead, the destruction of bourgeois savings by inflation, the Depression, and the revival of German power), so naturally they worried about whether Frenchwomen were losing that special something. The image in the illustrations of fashion magazines was youthful, active, and untethered to family or children. Anxious men engaged in a lot of hand-wringing over the emancipated "modern woman" who appeared to be abandoning traditional notions of femininity in favour of "masculinization." They needn't have worried. French designers and designing French women combined colour, fabric, and accessories to give distinctly feminine appearances to new styles of clothing. Fashion magazines rebuffed much of the criticism by portraying new styles as a necessary response to new roles and opportunities for women. Stewart shows that the ideals and aspirations of older French women seem to have turned toward the image of the liberated, active young woman popularized by the magazines. French couture adapted rapidly to this demand for clothes that would make a woman look and feel younger.

Stewart has read assiduously in long runs of a dozen fashion magazines. As befits her search for changing images, she pays close attention to the illustrations. Literary sources like popular fiction and autobiographies help flesh out this bulky database.

The book is not without flaws. The theoretical insights of David Frisby, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Lipovetsky, Roland Barthes, and others--invoked throughout her introduction--scarcely dent her empirical investigation thereafter. Stewart herself introduces the term "hybrid modernity" to describe what others might call "complex reality." There are few illustrations for a book based on the examination of fashion illustrations. Not all the chapters are fully rounded, and the chapter on labour relations in particular is particularly stunted. In spite of the strength of the chapters on couture as a business, one looks in vain for information on profit and loss. (Doubtless the tax collectors felt the same.)

All that said, this is a solid addition to scholarly knowledge on multiple topics. Stewart clearly demonstrates the importance of her subject and has mined her sources to good effect. Her findings add to our knowledge of an important sector of the economy between the wars. Her analysis of both image and discussion in French women's fashion magazines nicely complements the analysis of male anxieties about female identity offered by Mary Louise Roberts in Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994). Finally, in a brief epilogue comparing interwar fashion with the Vichy period, Stewart suggests that there was less of a rupture than one might have supposed. This observation points the way to further inquiry.

John S. Hill

Immaculata University